Indonesia: Creation and Femininity

Maleeha Changezi is 20 years old. She was born in Pakistan. She now lives in Djakarta, where she works as an English teach and aspire to become an artist.

I was 14 years old when I started to write poems in Urdu. I’ve let the majority of these poems in Pakistan.

Society Scar, Poem by Maleeha Changezi

This poem is my way to speak up about feminism, and especially feminism in Pakistan. It is quite different to be a woman in Indonesia. Here, I can play football. But being a woman was an everyday struggles back in Pakistan. Society was not ready to embrace women’s femininity as a whole. Women in the Pakistani society are not given the rights they deserve to have.There is no gender equality and the experience a lot of brutality. In their education, women are always taught to be under men. They are not given the right to study, especially in small villages. Men have been ruling the lives of women for centuries.

I have been in Indonesia for four years now. As a 20 year old woman, I have thought a lot about what it means to be a woman, and how to put it in words.

Woman, by Maleeha Changezi

I am not very comfortable to talk about my feelings, so I mostly paint them, hoping people could visualize them. There were many arts institutes back in Pakistan, but I did not stayed there long enough to study in one of them. I still want to be a professional artist though. But studying as a refugee here is barely possible in Indonesia.

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